Three days ago I finally got my chance to play through the highly hyped sequel of Infinity Ward`s block-buster, sales-record-breaking Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. I completed the whole action-packed campaign in around 6 hours in a sleepless night before my flight back to Germany. I decided to go to bed at around 07:00 AM and while I layed there for some time, completely awake, I startet pondering upon a question that has previously come to bother me many times…

Do video games actually have souls?

Was there even at The Beginnig in the 8-bit Era of Atari 2600, something special about certain games, something beyond the circuit boards of their cartridges?

30 years later, what makes a disk bored with billions of nano-holes, spinning at a few thousand RPM in the drive of our console or PC move us emotionally and leave an imprint on our memories just like a darn good novel can?

I have realized that these questions are rather subjective and one cannot really get a straight answer as easily as it sounds. Just think about it!

The gaming industry has expanded in the last two decades to a multi-billion-dollar business ($44+ bn last year!). Players` experience has evolved from spending twenty minutes with friends at the arcades for some Donkey Kong to being completely engrossed by all senses in a living and breathing world with nearly photo-realistic visuals. Simply said, people are not as easily impressed today.

Can you sit down and really imagine how you would react if you were able to catch a glimpse of some Crysis or Killzone 2 footage exactly 10 years ago, when you were scoring frags in Unreal Tournament on your Playstation 2 or PC?

Can you find the differences? Please do click on the images, resolution does matter.

My point is that this is an ever changing medium where your experience depends not only upon time but on your environment, views on life, etc. In spite of all the globalization stuff people like to worry about, an American, for example, might have a totally different emotional experience playing CoD: MW2 than me, having grown up in post-communism Eastern Europe (no, people, for the last time: eastern Europe doesn`t mean war destroyed land inhabited by wild savages like in Fallout 3!)

So basically, a game has a soul for me when it does something more than simply entertain me for a couple of days and then collect dust on a shelf forever forgotten. It has to induce really strong feelings in me, be it happiness, anger, fear or even sadness. I think that highly atmospheric games achieve that without even having to bother with some deeper meaning and enlightening truths at the end.

The sadly buggy S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was exactly such a game for me, I really felt the sorrow of its desolate and dead world. Mafia was one of the first games to really impress me on the emotional front, it simply had it all: pretty amazing graphics for its time, engulfing and highly atmospheric world and a very dramatic story. It spanned some years of the main protagonist`s life. You got the chance to really get know him and the other characters, to see them evolve and when shit happened to them you could empathize.

I think that exactly empathy is the key to the dramatic experience! I personally won`t be moved by the death or misfortune of a main character if I don`t give a shit about him, would you?

We see that the “soul” that those really special and memorable titles poses is a complex thing with many ingredients:

• detailed and realistically created world;
• believable and interesting “3-dimensional” (meaning not flat!) characters;
• dramatic story;
• some kind of premise or meaning;

Of course there are other many important aspects like fluid and intuitive controls, interesting gameplay mechanics and so on, but I think these things contribute more to the fun side of the game and not to this thing that I call “soul”. So in my opinion, a game has to fulfill at least one or more of the above mentioned criteria in order to offer a really memorable experience to us players but of course not all are necessary.

I think that Fahrenheit (aka “Indigo Prophecy”) is the best of example of what I mean. When this game came out it already had annoyingly dated visuals at first glance. The thing is, this game engrossed me in such a way that I was completely lost, not paying attention to crappy models and low-res textures. I was part of its magical world, totally oblivious to the fact that I was already late for school the first time I started it. All this now I realize was mainly due to its unique and quite innovative at the time implementation of quick-time events, quite an interesting story and a character I really cared for.

What games affected you in similar ways? Which titles had such a big impact on you?

Now that I defined what I understand under a game`s “soul” I will explain what does this all have to do with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Crysis in the second part.

to be continued…